What is the anatomy of an Entrepreneur? Is entrepreneurship learned? Or Genetic? Turns out, entrepreneurship is not something you’re born with.

It’s not an innate quality that you either have, or you don’t. It’s something much more complicated and deeper than that, and I believe that it is a skill that can be recognized, honed and refined over time.

While there are countless (literally; impossible to count), pieces/articles/posts on the Internet that try and delineate the “essential qualities” of an entrepreneur, this is sheer nonsense.

Wikipedia defines an Entrepreneur as “an owner or manager of a business enterprise who makes money through risk and initiative.”

Although this may seem to be pretty standard; Wikipedia’s reference to both “risk and initiative” is vital to understanding what an entrepreneur is. By way of this definition, a business owner who makes money through playing it safe and keeping his thoughts “inside the box”, so to speak, is NOT an entrepreneur.

Anybodycan be an entrepreneur, if they are willing to smile at ingenuity and laugh at putting their job-security and small things like salary on the line (not an easy task by any measure).

So rather than focus on ineffable and (rather), inconsistent qualities that people usually focus on in an entrepreneurship discussion, such as; “leadership” or “patience”, let’s focus on what EVERYONE is capable of doing if they desire:

Learning!

A key component of fostering an entrepreneurial spirit is the knowledge that there are many things that you simply do not know, but furthermore; that you are willing to work on and learn.

I’m going to keep things brief by focusing on my favorite 3 words, defining them (courtesy of Google) and explaining why you need to know them:

Cross-functional: “a process or an activity that crosses the boundary between functions” -> A rapidly increasing number of business activities are transforming to the interdepartmental and the multidisciplinary. With another perspective, say having marketing representatives sit in on company sales meetings, not only will you foster the birth of ideas but will strengthen office relationships and make employees feel that they want and need to contribute.

Retweet: “to repost another user’s message on the social networking website Twitter”-> Easily the hottest tech word of 2011! For starters, the more retweets, the better. If you are able to really harness the power of Twitter and tweet things which are relevant, you can not only spark conversations with potential clients, but also extend your reach drastically by getting yourself retweeted by people with lots of Klout.

Light-bulb moment: “a moment of sudden inspiration, revelation, or recognition” -> My personal favorite of the whole list. While many entrepreneurs are aware that they should be constantly looking for those light-bulb moments; far too few step back enough to know where to look for them. Remember; an idea that’s simple will have far more success and ease making it from inception to execution then an overly complex one.